1. Technical Field
The present invention generally relates to object recognition, in particular, to object recognition by fusion of image and spectrum.
2. Background
In recent years, food recognition techniques have attracted a lot of attention due to the emerging personal healthcare. However, image-based food recognition is a challenging task because of the variety of food's appearance even though images captured from the same food class. In this work, instead of the use of feature-based approach, patch-based visual appearance is employed directly.
Visual-based food recognition is one of the emerging applications of object recognition technology, because it will help estimate food calories and analyze people's eating habits for personal healthcare. Therefore, several works have been developed so far. Research in the computer vision community has explored the recognition of either a small sub-set of food types in controlled laboratory environments or food images obtained from the web. However, there have been only a few implemented systems that address the challenge of food recognition from images captured in real world environment. Moreover, most of them employed feature-based approach. This kind of method works well in constrained environment. However, the difficult thing of this kind of method is to find an invariant feature that is robust to distinct kinds of visual appearance resulted from different food placement.